Everything is Ghosts is a meditation on the fragility of new independence, and a juxtaposition of personal histories-in-progress with the troubled histories of a college town’s residents—many of whom are dead. This collection’s poems follow a group of college friends through their experiences with burgeoning adulthood, as they reckon with where they’ve been and whom they might be turning into. Whether braving a dorm haunted by the spirit of a basketball player and nebulous “shadow people,” daring each other out onto a murder-scene bridge at midnight, witnessing ghost hunters in the campus library, or wrestling personal hauntings like vehicular accidents, drug use, the after-effects of polio, and the passage of time, the players in Everything is Ghosts learn to keep one eye open at all times. As they create, carouse, and hold each other up, they learn that being haunted can have more than just one meaning.
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These luminous poems reveal how a college campus can be a whole cosmos where to ghost is not to disappear but to offer one’s presence, one’s abundance. Never have I encountered a collection so haunted by warmth, so peopled by tender stories. Tyler Robert Sheldon is a poet whose trust in language is only rivaled by his love for the places where strange meetings are inevitable, where libraries are sacred, "where silence is sacred as saddles in summer.”